Pete Wedderburn

Pete Wedderburn qualified as a vet twenty-five years ago, and now spends half his working life writing newspaper columns. He lives in Ireland with his wife, two daughters and a menagerie of dogs, cats, poultry and other furry and feathered companions. Pete answers readers' queries about their pets' health in his video Q&A – he is also on Twitter as @petethevet and has a Facebook Fan Page.

The new European labelling rules will bring significant changes to the labelling of the food on our supermarket shelves. The country of origin will need to be displayed on all meat packaging. Companies will no longer be allowed to label food as British just because it was processed in the UK. Information about the nutritional content of the food will also now be compulsory. So far, so good.

You would think that labelling of food would be a reasonable compromise: allowing religious minorities to prepare food in their own way, without imposing their chosen method of slaughter on animals destined for the wider market.

Harvey Locke, from the British Veterinary Association, summed up the situation clearly yesterday: “Slaughter without pre-stunning unnecessarily compromises animal welfare; there is no debate about this within the scientific community. By ensuring that all meat from animals that are not stunned only enters the specific communities that it is targeted at, we can make a significant difference. We have a moral obligation to each animal we use and we must do all we can to ensure the highest level of welfare for our livestock.”

The European decision on food labelling represents a missed opportunity for a reasonable compromise in this area. What now? If you want to avoid eating meat from unstunned animals, you only have one option: go vegetarian.